A wetter world as solar grand minimum deepens.

A few days ago I tweeted this comment above some remarkable video of the Three Gorges Dam bypass sluices.

Among other people, this was picked up by Willis, the warmist at WUWT, who used it as an opportunity to attack the reality of the Sun-climate connection:

The claims that decreasing solar activity will bring tropospheric cooling, and that the cooling will “wring” a significant amount of water out of the troposphere, both fail to find any observational or theoretical support in the tropospheric temperature and TPW datasets considered above.

As usual, Willis uses the wrong datasets, at the wrong timescale, with the wrong granularity, in order to obscure the truth.

My response to Willis was censored at the venue where he published his article. Not the first time WUWT has failed to give any right of reply, by any means.

Here’s the plot from Clive Best’s excellent blog, which shows that precipitation over land increased at the onset of the Dalton solar grand minimum, and is increasing again since the onset of the Landscheidt solar grand minimum.

Landscheidt said in 1999 that:

If a further connection with long-range variations in sunspot intensity proves reliable, four to five weak sunspot cycles (R < 80) are to be expected after cycle 23

The Dalton minimum started around 1800, and cycle 23 ended in 2009, exactly one De Vries cycle later. Sure enough, the 12 month average of the monthly sunspot number in cycle 24 peaked at 76 (118 using the new numbering system adopted in 2015).

The talkshop’s solar model output for the next 80 years of solar activity agrees well with Landscheidt’s prediction.